I don’t know what astrologers will make of it, but 65 years ago today, a German infant in Dusseldorf and a relatively poor not-black child in Waco, were born.
One became one of the most influential and popular serious film makers of his time. Here’s a moment from probably my second favorite film of my least favorite movie decade, “Wings of Desire” starring Bruno Ganz as an angel who envies us mortals.
Today’s other birthday boy became a rather talented comedian, writer, and actor and a bit underrated at all of it.
A confession: I’ve never seen “The Jerk.” Another one for the Netflix queue.
Best not to answer. I’ve probably seen only a small fraction of the H.P. Lovecraft adaptations out there — and many more of those than I ever was able to get through his stories whenever I came across them in the many science fiction and horrorish anthologies I devoured as a very young would-be literary geek. I always expected Lovecraft to be like Poe, who I loved. He wasn’t.
Anyhow, “Re-Animator” notwithstanding, this is clearly my favorite filmic adaptation so far — and beautifully animated and more or less 100% gore-free as it is, I’d didn’t even have to make myself half-drunk to comfortably watch it. Also, unlike the stories, this one moves at a very nice clip and let’s just say the rhetorical style is a bit less deliberately arcane though future generations might disagree on that score.
Part of me wants to dig up Lovecraft (his books, I mean) now and take a new whack at it in preparation for Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming potential geek classic, “At the Mountains of Madness.”
It’s been somewhat surprising, even given my own innate skepticism about practically everything, that for the last week or so there’s been very little compelling movie news — really very little that I could bring myself to even mention here. To be honest, I kind of liked that way. Much less time consuming and more fun to just throw trailers and stuff at you guys. The last 24 hours or so, however, have been a very different story.
* I often wonder where George Lucas went wrong in a number of departments. Today he’s King Midas in reverse with actors — who else could actually make Samuel L. Jackson boring? — but he directed the very well acted “American Graffitti.” His first two “Star Wars” movies were imperfect but great, great fun — and he had the great good sense to bring in the best writers available, and a very strong director, for the second one. He insisted on doing the three prequels himself, however, and in my opinion and lots of other people’s, showed how borderline unwatchable a space opera could be.
What went wrong? I don’t know but one thing that did happen to Lucas was the departure of producer Gary Kurtz, he of the Abe Lincoln beard who I honestly haven’t thought about in decades.
In all likelihood, this weekend’s likely #1 film, “The Expendables,” is not really a movie you need to see before you die. But if you are going to take that long, “Wild Bunch” style, walk to the multiplex, this totally entertaining 15 minute mash-up of numerous gratuitously violent, gun crazy, flicks from Steven Santos, Aaron Aradillas, and good ol’ Matt Zoeller Seitz, sponsored by The House Next Door, is just the thing to get you in the correct spirit.
Pretty magnificent. Also, Nice to Luke Wilson from “Bottle Rocket” in there. Fun coincidence considering the post below this one.
I guess it’s partly because of production code censorship, but it’s interesting that, while guns and movies have always gone hand-in-gunslinging-hand, the extreme fetishizing of the things seems to have begun about the time the production code truly died, paving the way for arguably the first truly ultraviolent big studio film, 1969’s “The Wild Bunch.” It also happens to be, I’m pretty sure, the second oldest film featured here (after ’66’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”) with one obvious exception from the birth of the movies right at the end. Or maybe I’m wrong. If anyone can think of a movie before 1966-69 in which guns were portrayed in the kind of tender loving detail we’re now used to, let me know.
Finally, get even more in the spirit of, er, gun fun, with this piece from the Bullz-Eye blog celebrating various multi-star manly action fests.
It’s been nearly 15 years since producer James L. Brooks bankrolled a feature version of a short film made by some Texas youngsters, and that movie (“Bottle Rocket”) introduced the movie world to director Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson, and his brother, Luke. Since then, Dallas-born Luke Wilson’s movie-star handsome likeness has become a highly familiar to filmgoers, playing both leading men and supporting roles mostly in comedies like “Legally Blonde,” “Old School,” and Mike Judge’s criminally maltreated “Idiocracy,” as well as “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and a classic cameo in “Anchorman.” (He was the anchor who — spoiler alert — got his arm was sliced off with a sword by Tim Robbins.)
To this day, Wilson has a habit of turning up in odd and interesting places, like a series of well-known commercials for AT&T or in the uneven but entertaining “Middle Men,” in which Wilson very credibly stars as a Texas businessman who gets much more than he expected at the intersection of e-commerce and adult entertainment. He is also preparing to play the part of Laura Dern’s flaky ex-husband on “Enlightened,” a new TV series from cult writer-producer Mike White (“Chuck and Buck,” “School of Rock“) with episodes directed by Oscar-winner Jonathan Demme.
At the risk of creating an embarrassing but perhaps partially correct impression of a man-crush, in person Luke Wilson is a highly charismatic guy. Behind his highly colloquial speech — I’ve left out a lot of “likes” — is an intelligence that, without giving away much of anything, dispenses with a lot of the usual show business interview platitudes. Now in his late 30s, he also appeared thinner than his slightly chunky appearance on “Middle Man” or his recent AT&T commercials. That was because Wilson had deliberately gone over his normal weight by about 25 pounds for the role of a hard-driving businessman and family guy.
